Venezuela & Colombia

High Energy Physics (HEP) is a growing research field in Latin-America. The level of involvement changes from country to country. Some play very active roles in international HEP collaborations such as Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Chile while in others the efforts are in initial stages such as Venezuela and Uraguay The common denominator is a huge potential and interests from young students and researchers.

In order to support the efforts and help building connections across countries the Physics Without Frontiers (PWF) Latin American team has organized roadshows annually in selected Latin-American countries since 2016. Five cities and 5 institutions were visited in Venezuela and Colombia in October of 2016, while 4 cities and 8 institutions were visited in 2017, adding this time also Peru to the list of countries. The two weeks roadshows were also supported by the ATLAS experiment and the CEVALE2VE group. CEVALE2VE (Centro de Altos Estudios de Altas Energías in Spanish) is a virtual research and learning community created in 2014 with the goal of promoting the scientific dissemination, education and research in HEP in Venezuela and Colombia.

Several educational activities take place during the roadshows including seminars by physicist from the ATLAS Collaboration, hands on sessions where the students analyse LHC data collected by ATLAS, virtual visits directly to scientists working at CERN and career and opportunities sessions in HEP. During these activities physics undergraduate and master students are introduced to cutting-edge research and tools used in HEP. The ATLAS open data project (add link) has been fundamental to achieve these goals as one of our main educational tools. As part of its commitment to open access and public engagement the ATLAS experiment has made available a large dataset to the public for the first time in 2016 and during the roadshows we have had over 60 people attending programming and open data access tutorials. In addition numerous outreach activities take also place during the roadshows engaging local schools, the general public and funding agencies.

Physics Without Frontiers roadshows have been very successful in Venezuela, Colombia and Peru. It has sparked much interest in young physics students and the general public.

From the 2016 roadshow, Maria Dias attended the CERN Summer School and Maria Di Domenico and Manuel Morgado attended the 9th CERN-Latin American school in Mexico in 2017. Also, Maria Di Domenico started a PhD in particle physics this year in Italy. We seek to continue bringing the PWF roadshow to Latin-America in order to inspire and engage students to continue a scientific career and to strengthen connections between countries and institutions in the region. Read the blog about the 2016 project more here

Photograph: Group photos from three of the Physics Without Frontiers activities.